As an athlete, your body requires a lot of energy.

Furthermore, if you are a youth athlete, your body is also growing, which requires even more energy.

You get that energy from your food.

When you don’t get enough energy from food, you are in a negative energy balance, or a deficit, and your body starts to prioritize where it “spends” its limited energy resources. Some processes just don’t get the energy they need for optimal function.

5 Signs You Aren’t Eating Enough:

1. You get injured frequently (especially injuries like tendinitis—jumper’s knee, shin splints, etc.—or even fractures and stress fractures).

2. Your menstrual cycle (if you are a menstruating human) is absent or irregular (especially when you are in season for your sport).

3. Your sleep quality isn’t great (you get about 8 hours per night but still wake up tired).

4. You find yourself feeling hungry during practices and/or games.

5. You feel sluggish, weak, or like you’re “running through mud” during training.

Energy Availability

At the end of the day, if you are not fueling properly, your training and our preventative or rehab efforts are only going to go so far toward supporting your body and you could be endangering your long term health.

Low energy availability (LEA) can lead to decreases in performance, fatigue, poor digestion, increased injury/illness, and loss of menstrual function when your body does not have energy resources to support these activities or functions.

Even scarier is RED-S, short for Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports, which occurs in women when there is a big difference between energy intake and expenditure and results in low energy availability, disrupted menstrual function (amenorrhea), decreased bone mineral density (i.e. osteoporosis), and many other serious health conditions.

Body Pressures

We live in a world where there is pressure to look and eat a certain way. This pressure is heightened in sports (especially sports associated with aesthetics—like dance, gymnastics, skating, cheer, etc.), women, adolescents, and other times of life or bodily transitions (like weddings or postpartum) and can often lead to restrictive and disordered eating behaviors.

Diet Culture

Diet culture refers to a society that places a strong emphasis on dieting, weight loss, and body image. It often promotes the idea that thinness is ideal and equates it with health and beauty. Diet culture can lead to harmful beliefs and behaviors related to food, weight, and body image as well as restrictive or rigid eating behaviors.

A body that is thin is not necessarily a healthy one. Health is a multifactorial quality dependent on many things: your genetics, nutrition, activity levels, environment, stress levels and management techniques, etc.. In fact, it’s often healthier for a person to be slightly overweight versus underweight.

I’m also going to say two things here because they need to be said

• BMI is not an accurate tool to gauge health (especially in women and athletes…because it was originally made based on MEN and it does not account for muscle mass differences).

• With few exceptions, athletes SHOULD NOT be dieting (eating fewer calories than they expend) while their sport is in-season.

Fat Phobia

Fat phobia, also known as weight stigma or weight bias, is the fear, discrimination, and prejudice against individuals who are perceived to be overweight or obese. Fat phobia can manifest in many forms including negative stereotypes, bullying, and discrimination based on a person’s weight.

I see fat phobia most often in our medical systems, when folks go see their primary care doctors and if they have an ounce of fat on their bodies, that weight is what gets blamed for whatever their current complaint is. Frequent headaches? It’s because you need to lose weight. Back pain? Lose weight. Sinus infection? Lose weight.

Food Morality

Folks in our society wrongly assign morality to our foods (some are good, others are bad) which often gets passed on to the morality of the person (person eating “good” food is being “good,” person eating “bad” food is being “bad”). Food is food. Fuel is fuel.

This food morality combined with so many food rules of diet culture can lead to disordered eating behaviors, including one that’s less well-known called orthorexia.

Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with eating health or “clean” foods. It is characterized by an extreme fixation on food quality and purity, to the point where it can negatively impact a person’s physical and mental well-being. Individuals with orthorexia may experience anxiety, guilt, and social isolation related to their rigid dietary restrictions.

That fitness influencer you follow who is super disciplined about their nutrition, who has a lot of rules and morality associated with what they eat, and avoids a lot of “life” things because of their strict diet…likely has orthorexia and disorder related to their eating habits and body image.

Eating enough & Fueling Properly

You’re a serious athlete. It’s time to step up your nutrition practices, so where should you start?

1. Get educated.

   Learn about protein, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, micronutrients like sodium, vitamins, etc., and hydration and where these elements best fit in an athlete’s day.

2. Create & implement habits (versus trying to follow a rigid meal plan).

   As an active-ish adult who weighs around 170lb and trains 2-4 days per week, my nutrition habits are to eat 4 protein-centered meals per day, with 30-40 grams of protein in each meal, get some fruits/veggies with at least 2 of those meals, and eat enough carbs/fats to feel satisfied and full. I’ve practiced this for many years, I can be pretty successful with these habits most days, and they are flexible enough that I don’t have anxiety around food if I eat out or at a social function. Your habits should be different and appropriate for your body, activity level, and lifestyle!

3. Unfollow anyone on social media who makes you feel bad about your body or promotes rigid, restrictive, or fad diets.

   Social media can be the best or worst thing in our lives. The best parts? Connecting with other awesome people, being inspired, learning from others’ examples. The worst parts? Folks without proper credentials pretending to be experts on certain topics (like nutrition) and spreading misinformation, comparison with others (especially when we only see the curated highlights of their lives that they share on social media) that makes us feel badly about ourselves, the cyberbullying that can happen from keyboard warriors in the comment sections. We do have some control over this, though. We can make liberal use of the “mute,” “block,” and “unfollow” buttons when folks or their content don’t enrich our lives. Please, protect your mental space.